Home & Almost Human Again

December 22, 2013

I haven’t written an entry in a while because I’ve been insanely busy.

Last week we went to the states for the first time with our daughter who is just over a year and a half old. It was a great adventure for her, during which she met most of my family for the first time and was showered with all sorts of awesome presents including a whole new wardrobe. We did not stop for a solid 10 days. All three of us are still completely exhausted.

My daughter and I managed to pick up a cold while we were there but we persevered, and thankfully it was all but gone by the time we left for flight #2.

While in Rhode Island we also celebrated Thanksmas with a ton of food, quality family time and Santa.

Everything about our trip except for traveling was absolutely wonderful.

(Rant to follow)

The problem traveling was when we set out to catch our flight home. We thought we were being clever and responsible by leaving Rhode Island by car to arrive in Newark for our flight with two hours to spare in addition to the two hours they recommend you leave for yourself arriving for an international flight. Unfortunately for us the 3.5 hour car journey took 10 hours and our flight left without us well before we managed to get ourselves to the airport.

Two hours of that time was spent absolutely stationary, in traffic because someone had hit the median on the opposite side of the highway. We got caught in this 30 mins after we headed out.

After we managed to get past that we spent a couple of hours driving at the speed limit (yay) and then traffic slowed again until we were crawling forward at about a car length every 20 mins. According to the sat nav, if we had been traveling at the speed limit we would have been at the car rental place in 35 minutes. Since we had never been there before and we weren’t even able to pull off because the traffic was so solid so we had to just trust the sat nav instead of seeking an alternative route. The most frustrating thing about that (besides the sat nav telling us that we were only 35 mins away) was that we were stuck in that traffic clusterfuck for over 2 hours before we saw a single sign suggesting that we should seek an alternate route because of bridge works which meant, this was a KNOWN ISSUE. Then after we saw that sign we were stuck in it for an additional 4ish hours because we couldn’t seek an alternate effing route and apparently neither could everyone else who was clogging up the roads, insisting on taking the same route.

Thankfully our daughter slept through the majority of that disaster and she was better behaved through all of it than we could have possibly hoped for. We are immensely proud of her.

After we made it to the airport at 10pm we spent an hour trying to speak to someone about getting ourselves on the next flight out (the next day at 8pm) lugging around 3 suitcases, a diaper bag, two carry on bags and a baby.

It was not good times.

We did manage to sort that out (sort of) and got ourselves into a hotel for the night which we arrived at around 11:30.

Above is a photo of us waiting for a pizza to be delivered because room service ended at 11:30 and we hadn’t eaten in 12 hours.

The hotel was amazing and the customer service was absolutely fantastic. (Best Western Robert Treat Newark) The man who shuttled us from the airport to the hotel was particularly lovely.

The next day we went back to the airport and they made us stand around for an additional 4 hours in two separate terminals with all of our luggage and a baby trying to sort out our reissued tickets because the airline we were flying with and the airline we booked through were both passing the buck back and forth and their computers somehow took 30 mins to boot up, then needed to be REbooted, because that’s how delightfully efficient and modern their systems are. We will never book flights indirectly again, even if it saves us money.

At any rate, after we got our bags checked and through security at long last everything that followed was a breeze and we eventually got home. We are so lucky that our little girl loves to sleep because we arrived at roughly 9am UK time … stayed up long enough to get some food in us and then all three of us were back to bed until 6:30pm.

That was Wednesday.

After making this journey several times back and forth in the last 10 years I have never been so exhausted and jet lagged.

And now that we have sort of gotten back into a normal routine we’re straight into the race up to Christmas! I’ve managed to write two articles on Squidoo and I know that I should write a few more by the end of the month but I just don’t know how much I’ve got in me right now.

We are really looking forward to Christmas morning with our little girl. I think it’s time to stop stressing and to finally just give ourselves a break!